


My Slippery Identity

by sidana



Series: The Peter Black Stories [2]
Category: Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter - Laurell K. Hamilton
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 12:06:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16218701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sidana/pseuds/sidana
Summary: Peter is figuring out who he wants to be and his place in the world





	My Slippery Identity

Disclaimer: not my characters, not my universe, I'll put them back when I'm done playing with them

Post-'The Harlequin'

Originally posted at Pomme de Sang

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Peter tried to keep his face calm as he passed Peter Black's ticket and driver's license to the airline gate agent. For all that Ted had said it was a perfectly real license created by the New Mexico MVD, part of him still worried that someone would discover that Peter Black wasn't quite real. But the gate agent barely looked at the license as she scanned his ticket and gave both items back to him. He slipped the ticket into a coat pocket, and the license into his wallet in front of credit and frequent flyer cards that also identified him as Peter Black. Then he followed Ted down the jet bridge, letting Ted put both of their duffles into overhead bins. Hopefully soon he would be allowed to lift something heavier than a tube of toothpaste on his own again. Maybe after his first doctor's visit back at home.

Before he sat down, he took a brief look around the plane, identifying how many rows there were to get to an exit. He couldn't see much of the other passengers, but that was okay. He had glanced around at most of them already in the boarding area while he had been pretending to read a magazine. And if there was trouble, he was ready to let the fed on the flight take charge of the situation. He had noticed the black woman being escorted past security while he waited to go through the metal detector, and she had been one of the first people to board the plane. Add in her sweater that was bulky enough she could probably hide a magnum in a belt holster underneath it, and she couldn't be anything other than a fed.

Peter took his seat, grateful that it looked like the seat in front of him was going to be vacant on this flight. Bad enough that he nearly hit his knees on the seat in front of him these days. He didn't need someone in front of him reclining their seat back, and smashing it into his kneecaps. As he reached for his seatbelt, he had to shift his wallet into a coat pocket in order to keep it from digging it into his hip.

It was entirely Peter Black's wallet, and everything in it had that name on it. Ted have even told him to use the credit card to buy gas when he had to. The idea was to quietly build enough records on Peter Black over time so that anyone who checked that name would have to feel like Peter Black was a real person.

He glanced over at Ted, and found himself wondering just what name had gone on his birth certificate way back when. Was he Ted who pretended to be Edward when he went out on gray assignments? Or was he Edward who had carefully built up Ted Forrester in order to be able to get away from being Edward for a time? And was this how it had started for him ten years ago?

For all that he pushed Ted in a lot of areas, there were some places he just couldn't ask Ted about directly. He was smart enough to figure out five different reasons why that would be a bad idea. And the trip had raised more questions than it had answered for him, down to learning that Ted had yet another name he went by on gray assignments- Death.

He was curious, but he definitely didn't know how to start a conversation up about that one. And it wasn't like in the movies where there was some sort of mystical internet search engine where he could easily look up 'bounty hunters known as Death' where he'd have all of his questions answered. Maybe Claudia would answer some of those questions. She had left him a business card when she visited him in the hospital, along with an offer of help from the wererats if he ever needed it. Her people hadn't seen the whole mess as him getting Cisco killed. Shit like that was apparently a part of doing business in her world. Instead, they had viewed it as them owing him one. They were the ones who had gotten him hurt because they hadn't caught a traitor in their midst.

He hadn't planned on ever taking them up on the offer. For all they claimed it wasn't his fault, he still felt guilty about it. But if it was just talking with some people, that wouldn't be so much would it? After all, Ted was talking about possibly marrying his mother. And it was his responsibility to make sure that Edward or Death or Edward's creepy friend Olaf was not going to hurt Mom or Becca, for all that Ted seemed to love both of them.

"Doing okay there?" Ted asked him. And it was definitely Ted who was talking to him. It wasn't just the accent, but the face and every bit of body language as well.

"Yeah. Kind of a hike from the ticket desk to where they parked the plane, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be." His stomach felt tight, but it didn't particularly hurt right now.

"That's good. Can't have you looking too pale for the welcoming committee back home."

Translation- he didn't need Mom freaking out when she picked them up from the airport. But you couldn't say too much that was too specific when you were out where anyone could overhear you. At least until he got off the plane, he was still Peter Black, and people named Donna and Becca Parnell weren't in Peter Black's family tree. He had to keep practicing keeping the two Peters separate from each other.

Until what? Until it because as automatic for him to move from Peter to Peter like it was for Ted to move to Edward. And maybe the trip was the start of making it easier to keep the two people apart in his mind. It wasn't Peter Parnell, high school kid, who had gone to St. Louis and helped save Anita. When he had first found out about Ted's alter-ego as Edward, Ted had said that he kept the two personas separate from each other because they each had different uses. Maybe it was time for him to start doing the same thing- keep being Peter Parnell to the people that mattered to him, but to start being Peter Black out in the field to keep others from following him home to the people he cared about.

Maybe some people would think of it as harsh or weird, and he was sure his therapist would have some sort of field day over the idea of two different Peters. But if he could pull it off like Ted did, it made a lot of sense to do it that way. The kind of life he was moving toward, it was like the biggest poker game in the world in a lot of ways, and one of the rules there was to never show your full hand, or everything you were capable of, or everything you were. Because you would live longer if you didn't give the other guy as much to use against you.


End file.
